


nothing comes easily, fill this empty space

by fiveyaaas



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: (not a lot but their trauma is there), Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Falling In Love, Fluff and Angst, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, I’ve been working on this fic for a while, Love Confessions, Mutual Pining, Oral Sex, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Smut, Title taken from lyrics of ‘grace’ by kate havnevik, i hope you enjoy the end result!!!!, i’m so sorry this took so long to get through!!!, thank you so much for making that gifset for me, this is for mars!!!!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:01:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26833339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiveyaaas/pseuds/fiveyaaas
Summary: Oftentimes, more adjusted people can say the literal words much easier. He comforted himself in that less adjusted people also said it too easily. It made it easier, that way.
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves
Comments: 5
Kudos: 85





	nothing comes easily, fill this empty space

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eldritching](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldritching/gifts).



> This is for Mars, who made such a lovely gifset in exchange for this!!! I appreciate you so much, and I’m so happy to be your friend!!!! Your gifsets regularly have me SOBBING. I hope you enjoy the end result of this because it really is more feelings based than anything and not a lot of smut. Thank you so much for all you do though, and I hope this was good 😭😭

**I.**

There are multiple ways to say it.

Oftentimes, more adjusted people can say the literal words much  _ easier.  _ He comforted himself in that less adjusted people also said it  _ too  _ easily. It made it easier, that way. 

And he said it in many ways. 

The first time he said it, without really saying it, was when they were five or so years old. He had leaned over to Seven, who had dropped the sole cookie she had gotten from the ones the new nanny (who they’d later call Mom) had baked, and handed her his own, saying, “Here. Take mine.”

It wasn’t a necessarily grand gesture, but Five was a selfish child. He didn’t share with anyone, and frankly found the concept of sharing repulsive. Seven had just looked so forlorn, staring at the cookie on the floor, and it had been an impulse. The nanny had said he was so sweet for sharing with Seven, and Five wanted to snap that he didn’t deserve to be praised just because he had been nice to Seven. Instead, he had decided in that instant that he would be obscenely and opaquely kind to Seven from then on, only to prove how simple it was. 

It had escalated from then on with new ways of saying it. The time she had hidden in the cupboards, eyes wet, and he had mumbled, “Don’t cry, Seven. I’m here for you.” It had been the first time he had ever initiated a hug in his life, but it was because she had looked so helpless when she cried. He just wanted to protect her from whatever made her sad. When he found out it was Reginald, that there was nothing he could do about it, he vowed to himself that he’d be there to at least comfort her where he could. 

There was the time Seven had been nine, and she had been staring in the mirror more and more, poking at her small face or tugging at strands of hair. Five had been confused why she was doing that, but he realized much later that it had been insecurity in how she looked, a new mode of self-deprecation for her. Five had caught her one day, trailing her finger over the tired bags under her eyes he associated with her nightmares. She’d flushed, and Five did too when she asked, “Five, am I pretty?” 

He’d cleared his throat loudly, ears bright pink in the mirror beside them, and muttered quietly, “I think you’re beautiful.”

When they were ten, and Seven had abruptly apologized after rambling about the others being jerks to her, Five had smiled softly, telling her, “It’s okay, Seven. You can tell me anything.”

Another time, when Seven had asked him if she could sleep in his bed and protect her from the nightmares, and he’d mumbled sleepily, pulling up the covers so she could crawl in, “You don’t ever have to ask, Seven.”

At eleven, when Seven had struggled with math studies, chewing on her pencil and raking her hands through her hair in frustration. Five had plopped down next to her chair, saying, “I’ll help you study, don’t worry.” 

There was the time he’d tried and failed to teleport with someone else after Reginald forced him into it, and Seven had nearly toppled over when he’d lost balance, and he’d gripped onto her shoulder, keeping her steady, hissing out, “Watch your step.”

There was the time he said it with another thing reserved for just her, just Seven- an apology. She had been about to receive her name, and, in an annoyance that she would choose to distance herself from something connecting them, he had snapped at her. When he had seen her cry for the first time  _ because _ of  _ him _ and she’d said he’d hurt her feelings and he’d admitted, both to himself and her, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

On their thirteenth birthday, when she had been laughing loudly at a joke he’d made, and he’d blurted, “Can I kiss you?” 

They’d shared their first kiss, and it actually didn’t say those words. Rather, it said a promise that they couldn’t verbalize or explain or fathom at all, but it was a promise he’d intended to keep for his whole life. Predictably, all of his intentions would melt and fade away in the fires at the end of the world.

He said it just a few weeks before he would leave for doomsday when they had to do some bullshit party for a press release and he’d seen her favorite flavor of cake and he’d grabbed a piece and teleported to her room and said, “I saved a piece for you.”

When Vanya had cried at thirteen, the night before he left, staring up at him and wiping snot on her sleeves as she explained some bullshit Diego had pulled. How she’d suddenly asked, “I’m sorry, wasn’t there something you wanted to say to me? You told me to come talk tonight, and I-“

“It can wait until tomorrow,” he had said. 

He’d left before he could say he loved her that time. 

**II.**

She wished, more than anything, that she had told him the actual words. 

For years in the time after, she would look back on her failure to do so, wondering if saying those words would perhaps give him a reason to  _ stay.  _ He was all she had, and then he was gone. Maybe it wasn’t that she hadn’t said those words at all, maybe it was that she couldn’t have anything without it being taken away from her. 

Oftentimes, in the dead of night, she’d assure herself that he had to have  _ known.  _ She would tell herself every way she  _ had  _ said it to him. 

The first time she had said it was when she had been called Seven. She had never  _ truly  _ warmed up to him until he had made it abundantly clear that he did care to be her friend. For some amount of time, she had assumed the only reason Five really wanted to be friends with her was to irritate their father and everyone else that insisted she not be a part of their family. She’d never even realized Five actually wanted to be her friend until he had asked if she promised to be his best friend forever. Seven, who had always wanted a best friend, had told him by grinning and saying, “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

It became a turning point for her, and she started to spend all of the scant amount of free time she had with him. They liked to spend their free time at the library, where she could pick out books for him to read and talk about when they had their next weekly discussion. Usually, it was just a way for Seven to know for sure that she had something to speak about in the thirty minutes, not used to speaking for so long. At one point, though, Five had refused to read any more of the ‘maudlin, depressing, and hopeless’ books Seven tried to convince him to read, and she’d searched through the library until she found Einstein’s  _ Relativity: the Special and the General Theory,  _ smirked, and commented dryly, “You might like this.”

Five very much enjoyed that she was most comfortable with him, saying that he liked to see the side of her that was snarky. She made a point to try to show him she was comfortable with him, saying the words she wanted to say by showing that side. She said it by teasingly asking, after having managed to sneak out without her father noticing she was absent at all, “It’s two sugars, right?” He’d rolled his eyes, snatching the black coffee from her hands, even though she made a face at the way he was able to swallow the bitter stuff down even at nine years old. 

It was not just that she was comfortable with him though, he was comfortable with  _ her _ . There was a period of time when they had been given a series of medical tests, much more than usual, and Five was starting to think that Father was going to start drugging them, to make them dependent upon him. Five had grown a sense of paranoia that had made him flinch away when Mom had gone to inject him with a substance one day, saying it was a vaccination. 

When Five had flinched away from a needle that Grace would soon pierce his skin with, Seven had settled down beside him, saying the words by asking kindly, “Can I hold your hand?”

It was the more overt ways as well, that didn’t quite  _ say  _ the words, but they said how she  _ meant  _ the words. How she self-deprecatingly twisted her lips into a small smile on the day they learned ballroom dance, set out her palm, and asked in a soft, sweet voice, “Can I have this dance?”

He’d smiled at her, taking her palm. She wondered if that had been him saying it too.

And then the Umbrella Academy had gone public. When she had become Vanya, rather than Seven, and she felt jealousy twisting her insides. She was bitter and resentful and angry to all of them, and Five most of all, for claiming to have been her friend and then readily separating himself from her and becoming one of them. 

But then she felt guilt for that anger as he was leaving behind. Right before his first mission, before he left, Vanya whispered, “Be careful.” And she was pretty certain he  _ knew. _

When his domino mask had slipped down, a year or so later before another mission, and she’d felt that spark of jealousy again and she’d staved it off as she beckoned him over, muttering, “Come here. Let me fix it.”

He’d leaned into her touch, letting her fasten the mask securely over his eyes. She told him “be careful” again, and he nodded tightly, blinking away.

The first night without him, Vanya had mumbled the actual words on her lips and then she had pressed her face to her pillows and cried herself to sleep and promised she’d never say them again.

Therefore, it wasn’t the actual words that she said the night that she decided she would have to forgive him for leaving her behind. She was seventeen years old, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to truly leave the house until she had offered up that forgiveness. So as she peered into his empty room one last time before leaving the house for a very long time, she said instead, “I just want you to be happy, even if it’s not with me.”

Vanya grew more comfortable over time, then, knowing what she was thinking. After saying the words aloud when she was thirteen, and after letting her heart shy away from the fierce resentment. Even though Vanya couldn’t write the actual words as she scribbled a personalized note to her brother in her memoir, she  _ could _ write, ‘I want you to have this. I want you to be home, so that I could see your eyes read the kind words I spared for you. But you are gone, and I think sometimes that you will never come home. Maybe if I hope enough, you will decide you do want to come back to me. I promise that I’ll still be here when you’re ready. If you never are, though, I’ll understand.’”

**III.**

For a short time, Five couldn’t really say it at all, not in any words. He supposed, in some ways, there had been gestures that indicated how he felt. How he let her clean his wounds when he would undoubtedly let no one else do so, how he’d told her a simple sentence about her book, even if he wanted to give a speech about it. He didn’t have time, one must understand, with the end of the world hanging over him.

He was a fucking idiot, and he learned it the hard way. 

Slowly, slowly, slowly their trust for one another started to peek around the corner, and they could finally say the words (while not actually verbalizing them at all) again. It was a dance around the emotions, a leap away from their true thoughts and feelings, a magic trick- an illusion that they could pretend not seeing the smoke and mirrors, filling their lungs and suffocating and noticing the eeriness (yet glaring obvious just past the surface level) like stumbling through a funhouse. 

He said it when she’d looked frightened at walking past the street Leonard had once worked on, and he’d told her, “It’s okay. I’ll walk you home.”

Then again, when she trained for hours with no results, and he’d urge, “You can do it. I believe in you.”

Silently, he’d forgiven her. He didn’t say that out loud because he’d always struggled with words, but he did offer when he went out, “Do you want to come too?” 

She followed him along, not much else to do in her life, and he grew accustomed to her companionship with an ease he’d always had for being around her. 

He said it when he saw her starting to fall asleep at the wheel, exhausted by all of the training, and he told her, by saying, “Pull over. Let me drive for a while.”

She acquiesced. Sentimental, he said it again, asking, “Is your seatbelt on?”

When she had demurely confessed that she hadn’t been worried if she’d hurt all of them and then said her feelings were too large, too much, too  _ heavy,  _ and Five had implored, “It’s not too heavy. I’m stronger than I look.”

There was the time she had an awful sore throat and cough, and he’d nicked some cough syrup from a local pharmacy after he’d realized that she hadn’t any in her medicine cabinet. He’s said it as he’d had her open her mouth, spooning the disgusting, viscous, deep indigo stuff into her mouth, grimacing as he said, “Here, drink this. You’ll feel better.”

He said it when she mentioned that she wished she had been able to get tickets for a one-night-only performance with one of her favorite violinists, and he’d frowned and told her, “I already bought you a ticket.” He said it when she hugged him fiercely, and he disentangled from her quickly, grouchily commenting, “Don’t make a bigger deal out of this than necessary. I had two tickets, and I figured you’d want to go.”

He made the mistake of leaving her behind to take care of a few things once.

It was as he had snapped out, “Don’t worry about me.” He’d wanted to say something else when she had tenderly cleaned his wounds, but the way she’d looked at him, like he was a child, it hurt too much. He didn’t want to be angry when he said them.

They’d fought for a bit before she’d glanced down and cleared her throat. 

She’d looked up at him then, bit her lip with her incisors, said that she was going to drive around for a little bit to clear her head, and he swallowed his pride to tell her, “Drive safely.”

It was as they whispered apologies to one another when they got home, and he tasted the sting of whiskey in his throat as he tangled his fists into her glossy hair.

He said it as he flitted to her work, panting sheepishly at her as he realized that it was raining and she’d left this morning without one, “I brought you an umbrella.” She’d raised her brows at him, confused why he’d teleported to her simply to make sure she didn’t get soaked in the rain, and he’d scowled at her, hoping to convey with his face, ‘do not ask me.’

He knew that they were approaching something  _ more,  _ but they couldn’t ever reach it because he’d damned himself and damned them as well in the process. 

So as he saw the sadness of her eyes, knew the cognitive dissonance she must be feeling when she looked at his lips and started to cry in frustration and embarrassment and self-deprecation, he held himself from blurting out the words because he didn’t want her to hurt any longer, instead saying, “I’ll wait. I can wait for you, okay? I can wait.”

They knew it was all he  _ could  _ say.

**IV.**

They grew and gravitated towards one another, never quite reaching despite knowing they  _ could _ if the world wasn’t so cruel. 

Still, she said it to him.

Like when he hadn’t slept in six days and he’d been at his wit’s end and told her that the apocalypse was too important and she quietly told him, “You’re important too.”

Or when he’d had to park his car on the side of the road on a busy highway because a panic attack had prevented him from being able to drive. He’d called her, crying and ashamed, and she’d simply dropped everything she was working on and told him, “Stay there. I’m coming to get you.

It was when she opened her closet, gestures inside, and told him softly, “You can have half.” 

He raised his brows at her, but he followed her direction and moved in.

It was when they both blurted “happy birthday” on their respective 61st and 32nd birthdays and then awkwardly moved around their home, looking at one another when they knew the other wasn’t.

He’d have a nightmare, fueled by post-traumatic stress, and he’d apologize as he crawled into her bed and she’d look up at him and say, “It’s okay. I couldn’t sleep anyway.”

She’d said it when he’d press his face into her shoulder, still crying, and she’d mumble, “Take a deep breath.”

She approached the words when she’d seen him the first day he had gotten the forty something body. He’d nervously tugged at a tie on a new suit she’d bought for him in celebration, and she’d fixed it for him, beaming up at him, and saying, “Don’t worry. It looks good on you.”

**V.**

She’d said it when she’d breathily moaned against his mouth, “Stay here, with me, please.” And he’d said it when he’d agreed. And she’d said it when she took off her clothes. And he’d said when he scooped her up into his arms and carried her to her bed. And she’d said it when she opened her mouth again, letting him taste her fully. And he’d said it when he was pushing inside of her. And she’d said it with the startled and contented noises she uttered. And he’d said it when he promised that he’d never leave her behind again. They just didn’t say it with the actual words because they both  _ knew. _

It was the way she told him upon seeing his horribly scarred and disfigured body after as it hit the moonlight in their apartment and he’d flinched away from the light, “It doesn’t bother me, Five. You got injured trying to save us. It’s proof that you do care.”

She crawled on top of him, showing him that she cared too, sinking onto him again and again and promising to be his forever.

When he’d murmured, “What does this mean, V?”

And she panicked, so he said it to her when she asked what he wanted her to say, and he’d told her gently, “You don’t have to say anything until you’re ready.”

**VI.**

She confessed, hours later, that she had been with people before, shyly saying, “It was because it reminded me of you… but it was also because I thought maybe it would bring you home. Sorry, I know that’s stupid.”

He admitted out loud, for the first time, who Delores was, how she’d held a similarity to Vanya. She’d wondered about Delores, but Five had always been evasive on the topic. She understood why, then. Five explained that it was hard at one point, having regularly slept and ate and interacted with other people, when he’d seen her on display and understood that she’d never really spoken at all. Vanya could not imagine how jarring it would have been, gaining that knowledge. She’d hallucinated before as well when she’d gone off her meds before destroying the world. Vanya did not judge him for it all, vowed to never joke about Delores the way the others had tended to (and Vanya had had to stifle herself from asking about her then too.)

They talked for a little about it all, but it led to kissing and then touching and then he’d been moving his mouth between her legs and she’d stared down at him with wide eyes. She panted and told him he didn’t have to, he'd looked up at her, smirking and said, “Yeah, but I want to” before pressing his mouth to her.

That night, they had barely disentangled at all. And then the morning had come, and she’d panicked, taking a shower and pulling on clothes so she could hopefully manage to go to work, despite being completely tired out. 

Five asked her what she was doing when she tripped over her pants, and she explained. 

He arched a brow at her, kissed her cheek, and commented, “Have a good day at work.”

He blinked to the coat rack before settling his jacket onto her shoulders, mumbling, “Take my jacket, though? It’s supposed to be cold outside this morning.”

She decided then that she’d call into work because they did need to talk about this. 

Of course, this led to them kissing and touching and then fucking again. It was when in the aftermath she said she waited for him almost all of her life, and he said, “Sorry I’m late.”

His eyes had gone wild, then, asking her what this meant. Now that they'd crossed this barrier of words, were speaking to one another completely transparently, he needed to know. She’d simply said, “Well, what do you want it to mean?”

As he admitted that he was not sure whether or not he’d ever be able to ever to truly get better, she told him, “I don’t know for myself, either, but we’ll figure it out.”

**VI.**

He’d woken to her tears, but she smiled reassuringly, letting him know they were just happy ones, touched his cheek, and gently commanded, “Go back to sleep.”

When she’d wrapped her arms around him from behind, keeping him safe in her embrace, both as a reassurance to her that he wouldn’t go away again and as a reassurance to him that she was there for him. She kissed his shoulder and asked him, “Is this okay?”

“Always,” Five told her. “I love you.”

She said it back, and they both realized in that moment that it never would have been hard to say at all. Loving each other was the simplest thing they had ever done or ever would do.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you guys for reading, please make sure to check out the fivevanya tumblr for fiveya week information!!!


End file.
